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Topic: A very High Tech repair (Read 3279 times)

Plea from the wife today - her wheel barrow tyre keeps deflating. Now I'd known this for a while, it was on the 'to do' list, but not at the top - after all I have provided an outside tyre inflater 'station' with air always on tap

Now the bottom had rotted out of a barrow that I used to use for pig muck, so when I threw it away I'd saved the wheel and tyre to put on her barrow.

Totally different fittings for the axle so a bit of lathe work to make one work in the other and off she goes happy

So I thought I'd look at the original (fairly new) wheel, see if anything was obvious and if not put a tube in it. Dunking it in the workshop sink there's not one puncture - there's literally thousands - air is seeping through the porous rubber

I bought a pressurized garden sprayer locally, US brand, and filled it up to do battle with a poison ivy patch, and the handle too was filled with pinholes, so basically sprayed myself. So I called the mfr. and started to tell my story when the lady on the end of the line stopped me and asked "name and address?" I gave it to her and she said she was sending a replacement handle assembly. It got here 2 days later. I'm guessing I wasn't the first to call in with this issue!

I've found those cheepo pneumatic wheels and tyres a constant source of flat tyres. I have a sack barrow which has always deflated, in anger I used one of those repair aerosols on it, both wheels, now they go flat, but over a much longer period! I know those aerosols are not a good solution under normal circumstances, but at four miles an hour max, I don't really care!

My demo labourers can wreck a barrow in a few days. Why they want to work so much harder pushing a piled-high barrow when they could wheel a level-load one so easily is beyond me but the barrows cost a fortune if you have to replace four of them every week at 50 quid a pop.So we bought four heavy duty barrows for a hundred quid each (with discount, retail is £165) with a beefy frame and yellow plastic bin. That was last September and since then they have probably moved a thousand tonnes of rubble between them and they are still going strong. Haven't even had to put air in any of the tyres yet.

Might seem a lot of cash for a wheelbarrow but the value for money is terrific. This is the type we got:

Years ago, probably 1974-5, I bought two Dyson 'Ball Barrows' as we were doing up houses, loads of rubble and concrete to move, and much of it over soft ground. They lasted amazingly well - still had them probably 10 years later. Eventually the plastic tubs split, and repeated 'hot melt glue gun' repairs failed after a few weeks. Never ever had a flat tyre ball in all those years.